Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are avalable for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), and a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff).

Nmap was named “Security Product of the Year” by Linux Journal, Info World, LinuxQuestions.Org, and Codetalker Digest. It was even featured in eight movies, including The Matrix Reloaded, Die Hard 4, and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Nmap is ...

* Flexible: Supports dozens of advanced techniques for mapping out networks filled with IP filters, firewalls, routers, and other obstacles. This includes many port scanning mechanisms (both TCP & UDP), OS detection, version detection, ping sweeps, and more. See the documentation page.
* Powerful: Nmap has been used to scan huge networks of literally hundreds of thousands of machines.
* Portable: Most operating systems are supported, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, Mac OS X, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS, Amiga, and more.
* Easy: While Nmap offers a rich set of advanced features for power users, you can start out as simply as "nmap -v -A targethost". Both traditional command line and graphical (GUI) versions are available to suit your preference. Binaries are available for those who do not wish to compile Nmap from source.
* Free: The primary goals of the Nmap Project is to help make the Internet a little more secure and to provide administrators/auditors/hackers with an advanced tool for exploring their networks. Nmap is available for free download, and also comes with full source code that you may modify and redistribute under the terms of the license.
* Well Documented: Significant effort has been put into comprehensive and up-to-date man pages, whitepapers, tutorials, and even a whole book! Find them in multiple languages here.
* Supported: While Nmap comes with no warranty, it is well supported by a vibrant community of developers and users. Most of this interaction occurs on the Nmap mailing lists. Most bug reports and questions should be sent to the nmap-dev list, but only after you read the guidelines. We recommend that all users subscribe to the low-traffic nmap-hackers announcement list.
* Acclaimed: Nmap has won numerous awards, including "Information Security Product of the Year" by Linux Journal, Info World and Codetalker Digest. It has been featured in hundreds of magazine articles, several movies, dozens of books, and one comic book series. Visit the press page for further details.
* Popular: Thousands of people download Nmap every day, and it is included with many operating systems (Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc). It is among the top ten (out of 30,000) programs at the Freshmeat.Net repository. This is important because it lends Nmap its vibrant development and user support communities. .

[i]Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free. [/i] - RMS

o Nmap has moved. Everything at http://insecure.org/nmap/ can now be
found at http://nmap.org . That should save your fingers from a
little bit of typing. Even though transparent redirectors are in
place for the old URLs, please update your links and bookmarks. And
if you don't have a link to Nmap on your web site, now is a good
time to add one .

o All of your OS detection fingerprints up until March 10, 2008 have
now been integrated by David. The second generation database has
grown from 1,085 fingerprints representing 421 operating
systems/devices, to 1,304 fingerprints representing 478 systems.
That is an increase of more than 20%. New fingerprints were added
for Mac OS X Tiger, iPod Touch, the La Fonera WAP, FreeBSD 7.0,
Linux 2.6.24, Windows 2008, Vista, OpenBSD 4.2, and of course
hundreds of broadband routers, VoIP phones, printers, some crazy
oscilloscope, etc. We get a ton of new fingerprint submissions, but
not as many corrections. Please remember to visithttp://nmap.org/submit/ if Nmap gives you bad results, whether they
are completely wrong or just a slight mistake (like Nmap says Linux
2.6.20-2.6.23, but you're running 2.6.24). Of course you need to be
certain you know exactly what is running on the target before you do
this.

o All of your service fingerprints and corrections submitted until
January 14, 2008 have now been integrated by Doug. As usual, he has
documented his adventures at http://hcsw.org/blog.pl/33 . More than
a hundred signatures were added, growing the database to 4,645
signatures for 457 services. Corrections are welcome for service
detection too -- visit http://nmap.org/submit/ if you get incorrect results.

o Nmap now saves the target name (if any) specified on the command
line, since this can differ from the reverse DNS results. It can be
particularly important when doing HTTP tests against virtual hosts.
The data can be accessed from target->TargetName() from Nmap proper
and host.targetname from NSE scripts. The NSE HTTP library now uses
this for the Host header. Thanks to Sven Klemm for adding this
useful feature.

o Added NSE HTTP library which allows scripts to easily fetch URLs
with http.get_url() or create more complex requests with
http.request(). There is also an http.get() function which takes
components (hostname, port, and path) rather than a URL. The
HTTPAuth, robots, and showHTMLTitle NSE scripts have been updated to
use this library. Sven Klemm wrote all of this code.

o Fixed an integer overflow in the DNS caching code that caused nmap
to loop infinitely once it had expunging the cache of older
entries. Thanks to David Moore for the report, and Eddie Bell for
the fix.

o Added IPv6 host support to the RPC scan. Attempting this before
(via -sV) caused a segmentation fault. Thanks to Will Cladek for
the report. [Kris]

o Fixed an event handling bug in NSE that could cause execution of
some in-progress scripts to be excessively delayed. [Marek]

o A new NSE table library (tab.lua) allows scripts to deliver better
formatted output. The Zone transfer script (zoneTrans.nse) has been
updated to use this new facility. [Eddie]

o Rewrote HTTPpasswd.nse to use Sven's excellent HTTP library and to
do some much-needed cleaning up. [Kris]

o Added a new MsSQL version detection probe and a bunch of match lines
developed by Tom Sellers.

o Added a new service detection probe and signatures for the memcached
service [Doug]

o Added new service detection probes and signatures for the Beast
Trojan and Firebird RDBMS. [Brandon Enright]

o Fixed a crash in Zenmap which occurred when attempting to edit or
create a new profile based on an existing one when there wasn't one
selected. The error message was:
'NoneType' object has no attribute 'toolbar'
Now a new Profile Editor is opened. Thanks to D1N (d1n@inbox.com)
for the report. [Kris]

o Fixed another crash in Zenmap which occurred when exiting the
Profile Editor (while editing an existing profile) by clicking the
"X", then going to edit the same profile again. The error message
was: "No option named '' found!". Now the same window that appears
when clicking Cancel comes up when clicking "X". Thanks to David
for reporting this bug. [Kris]

o Another Zenmap bug was fixed: ports consolidated into "extra ports"
groups are now counted and shown in the "Host Details" tab. The
closed, filtered and scanned port counts in this tab didn't contain
this information before so they were usually very inaccurate. [Kris]

o Another Zenmap bug was fixed: the --scan-delay and --max-scan-delay
buttons ("amount of time between probes") under the Advanced tab in
the Profile Editor were backwards. [Kris]

o Reordered the UDP port selection for Traceroute: a closed port is
now chosen before an open one. This is because an open UDP port is
usually due to running version detection (-sV), so a Traceroute
probe wouldn't elicit a response. [Kris]

o We now escape newlines, carriage returns, and tabs (\n\r\t) in XML
output. While those are allowed in XML attributes, they get
normalized which can make formatting the output difficult for
applications which parse Nmap XML. [Joao Medeiros, David, Fyodor]

o The Zenmap man page is now installed on Unix when "make install" is
run. This was supposed to work before, but didn't. [Kris]

o The DocBook XML source code to the Nmap Scripting Engine docs
(http://nmap.org/nse/) is now in SVN under docs/scripting.xml .

4.53

o Impoved Windows executable installer by making uninstall work better
on systems which changed the default install path. The shortcut is
also now deleted properly on Vista. [Rob Nicholls]

o Windows installer is now generated using NSIS 2.34 rather than
2.13. [Fyodor]

o Added UPnP-info NSE script by Thomas Buchanan. It gathers
information from the UPnP service (UDP port 1900) which listens on
many network devices such as routers, printers, and networked media
players.

o Fixed a --traceroute bug (assertion failure crash) which occured
when the first hop of the first host in a tracegroup (reference
trace) times out. Thanks to Sebastián García for the bug report and
testing, and Eddie for the patch.

o Fix a problem which prevented proper port number matching in
NSE scripts (port_or_service function) due to a variable
shadowing bug. [Sven Klemm]

We are pleased to release Nmap 4.75, with almost 100 significant improvements since version 4.68. Key changes include:

* Fyodor spent much of this summer scanning tens of millions of IPs on the Internet (plus collecting data contributed by some enterprises) to determine the most commonly open ports. Nmap now uses that empirical data to scan more effectively.
* Zenmap Topology and Aggregation features were added, as discussed in the next news item.
* Hundreds of OS detection signatures were added, bringing the total to 1,503.
* Seven new Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) scripts were added. These automate routing AS number lookups, “Kaminsky” DNS bug vulnerability checking, brute force POP3 authentication cracking, SNMP querying and brute forcing, and whois lookups against target IP space. Many valuable libraries were added as well.
* Many performance improvements and bug fixes were implemented. In particular, Nmap now works again on Windows 2000.

1. Major Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) Expansion
As the Nmap core has matured, more and more new functionality is developed as part of our NSE subsystem instead. In fact, we've added 171 new scripts and 20 libraries since Nmap 6. Examples include firewall-bypass, supermicro-ipmi-conf, oracle-brute-stealth, and ssl-heartbleed. And NSE is now powerful enough that scripts can take on core functions such as host discovery (dns-ip6-arpa-scan), version scanning (ike-version, snmp-info, etc.), and RPC grinding (rpc-grind). There's even a proposal to implement port scanning in NSE. [More Details]

2. Mature IPv6 support
IPv6 scanning improvements were a big item in the Nmap 6 release, but Nmap 7 outdoes them all with full IPv6 support for CIDR-style address ranges, Idle Scan, parallel reverse-DNS, and more NSE script coverage. [More Details]

3. Infrastructure Upgrades
We may be an 18-year-old project, but that doesn't mean we'll stick with old, crumbling infrastructure! The Nmap Project continues to adopt the latest technologies to enhance the development process and serve a growing user base. For example, we converted all of Nmap.Org to SSL to reduce the risk of trojan binaries and reduce snooping in general. We've also been using the Git version control system as a larger part of our workflow and have an official Github mirror of the Nmap Subversion source repository and we encourage code submissions to be made as Github pull requests. We also created an official bug tracker which is also hosted on Github. Tracking bugs and enhancement requests this way has already reduced the number which fall through the cracks. [More Details]

4. Faster Scans
Nmap has continually pushed the speed boundaries of synchronous network scanning for 18 years, and this release is no exception. New Nsock engines give a performance boost to Windows and BSD systems, target reordering prevents a nasty edge case on multihomed systems, and NSE tweaks lead to much faster -sV scans. [More Details]

5. SSL/TLS scanning solution of choice
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, SSL, are the security underpinning of the web, so when big vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, POODLE, and FREAK come calling, Nmap answers with vulnerability detection NSE scripts. The ssl-enum-ciphers script has been entirely revamped to perform fast analysis of TLS deployment problems, and version scanning probes have been tweaked to quickly detect the newest TLS handshake versions. [More Details]

6. Ncat Enhanced
We are excited and proud to announce that Ncat has been adopted by the Red Hat/Fedora family of distributions as the default package to provide the "netcat" and "nc" commands! This cooperation has resulted in a lot of squashed bugs and enhanced compatibility with Netcat's options. Also very exciting is the addition of an embedded Lua interpreter for creating simple, cross-platform daemons and traffic filters.

7. Extreme Portability
Nmap is proudly cross-platform and runs on all sorts of esoteric and archaic systems. But our binary distributions have to be kept up-to-date with the latest popular operating systems. Nmap 7 runs cleanly on Windows 10 all the way back to Windows Vista. By popular request, we even built it to run on Windows XP, though we suggest those users upgrade their systems. Mac OS X is supported from 10.8 Mountain Lion through 10.11 El Capitan. Plus, we updated support for Solaris and AIX. And Linux users—you have it easy.